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Carmack: PS3 Performance Lags Behind 360
As part of our look at id’s new multiformat shooter-cum-driver Rage featured in the new issue of Edge, out in UK shops on Monday, we saw that the frame rate of the PS3 version currently lags some way behind the 360’s.
The 360 version matches the PC’s 60 FPS while the PS3’s framerate runs at just 20-30 FPS. “The PS3 does lag a little bit behind in terms of getting the performance out of it,” Carmack acknowledges.
“The rasteriser is just a little bit slower – no two ways about that. The RSX is slower than what we have in the 360. Processing wise, the main CPU is about the same, but the 360 makes it easier to split things off, and that’s where a lot of the work has been, splitting it all into jobs on the PS3.”
He is, however, confident that the PS3 version will match that of all other supported platforms: “Everything is designed as a 60 hertz game. We expect this to be 60 hertz on every supported platform.”
“The work remaining is getting it locked so there’s never a dropped frame or a tear, but we’re confident that we’re going to get that.”
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I just hope that both console versions don't suffer from screen tear at 1080p. I bloody hate that in a game.
Pfft, crybaby. Maybe the folks at Criterion Games could quit hogging the cross-platform cluestick and smack Carmack a few times with it.
I don't think this is really a story, unless the PS3 version actually runs slower on release.
It does appear to be a bit of a trend that some developers are taking a bit of time getting games up to PS3, but I think the only weird thing is that it is clearly possible, but not everybody knows how to do it yet. I mean, doesn't Wipeout run in 120fps? You'd think sony would just send out a framerate FAQ or something (yes, i am oversimplifying drastically).
Anyway, this is only a story if the PS3 release version of rage isn't a 60 fps fps.
Both things are true -
1.) PS3 version of Rage lags a bit beside XBox 360 - Carmack
2.) PS3 version version will run at 30 fps or 20 fps _ edge quoting Carmack
Edge is using Carmack's quote for fanwars, but the fact is true also.
It is clearly written in book "cross platform game programming" that if u do not get 60 fps (exactly 60 fps) then the next stop is directly 30 fps on PS3. Meaning if u get 59 fps even once, PS3 will revert to running in 30 fps, it is architected that way, and after that 20 fps(even if u get 29 fps. So u see both are correct.
And that is why Carmack said that he will lock fps at 60 htz(Also the game functions and updates itself at 60 Hz). Anyway he is pretty confident that he will deliver 60 fps by the time game is finished(Just drop the quality a bit to get 5 fps more, and difference is not even noticable). It looks like as if he is getting 55 fps on PS3 but due to way PS3 functions it reverts to 30 fps.
It is ceratinly not a big challenge to get that bit more performance, but he is actually sad at the level of effort invested in PS3 vs XBox 360(which is lot easy to program and a dominant console now). Ipersonaly do not favour any Console. I like PC(u get 59 fps if that is what is presented).
And PC has lots of Ram too(if u feed it).
Anyway this discussion is pointless seeing u can easily drop visual quality a bit to get some more fps and Carmack clearly says that performance is a bit less, which actually makes PS3 (thank u sony) run it at 30 fps.
Sometimes it amuses me to watch fan wars.(By people who really even do not know the specs of consoles even)
And I really do not think Rage will look better then Crysis even if it comes out after 2 years, and it will not be as fun to play as Fallout 3 (though Rage wil have far better Shooting and Driving which possibly will make it a very enjoyable and good game, but it lacks the core of Fallout 3 and does not will be "interesting" making someone to keep playing it time and again).
I think visually
1.) Crysis, 2. ) GTA 4, 3.) Oblivion, 4.)Half-Life 2 and that is the end. All these games are the most beautiful and ahve clear realistic graphics and a beauty to look at with top quality artwork.
And Gameplay wise is a matter of subjective opinion.
Wow, Thanks!
That explains a lot.
I am confident that Carmack will make Rage run at 60 fps, given his history of doing atleast what he openly says, and his knack for making games work on lowest hardware(Quake 1 on 33 MHz CPU complete, Doom 3 playable on Uber stupid Geforce 4000 MX, actually a DX7 featured card lacking shaders completely and that too after release.)
By the way the screenshots in edge article are looking cool, reminds me of Mad Max 3 Beyond Thunderdome. If they just do it right, even just copy the whole Fallout 3 with quality run and gun shooting I am more then happy. Though it already looks a Shooter Fallout 3 conceptually. Still great.
Are u a game developer?
Quake 1 on a 33mhz cpu? It might run but would be unplayable.
That was what every body said to Carmack but he was a man of results and ultimatley Quake 1 was completely playble on 33 MHz CPU, on software Renderer! That is why he is so much respected to this day. Also input of Assembly language guru Michael Abrash was also critical in Quake 1 performance. Abrash also wrote pixomatic software renderer for ut2004 later.
In any case at that time it was very big challenge to run a 3D game on the hardware available(doom was a 2d game with height encode in 2d map, so there were no room on rooms and one cannot look up and down. Quake 1 was pure 3d(first done by build engine of duke nukem though, still quake had the impact)
..
I wish Carmack would make his mind up.
"In an interview with Shacknews, id's John Carmack reiterated that the Xbox 360 version of Rage will look worse than the PlayStation 3 version.
Carmack said that the uncompressed build of Rage encompasses a terrabyte of data, and that id will need to use a "different type of compression" to fit the game on two dual-layer Xbox 360 DVDs."
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/53976
Now this is getting really fun. So TEH BLURAY was useful beyond just playing movie discs after all :3
All jokes aside, lets just wait and see. In any case we all just know that both platform are very capable and can perform aprox at the same performance. On the hardcore graphic whore side? just buy a big fat PC and play it there.
He is, however, confident that the PS3 version will match that of all other supported platforms: "Everything is designed as a 60 hertz game. We expect this to be 60 hertz on every supported platform".
That statement makes this whole story redundant. Man, Edge is getting worse.
Alls I know is I look at the Uncharted 2: Among Thieves E3 demo and that don't look like a system with performance issues to me. All respect to Carmack but maybe he needs to go get some lessons from Naughty Dog.
The obvious point about comparing a cross platform game with a PS3 exclusive is that the Uncharted is written to work well on a PS3 from the ground up, it's written to look good within the constraints of that system, the same goes for any platform exclusive that uses an engine written to work with that platform only, even more so when it is developed by a company owned and funded by the platfrom holder. Carmack is one of the only people in this industry with the respect and independance to be able to make such statements without fear of the consequences, so when he talks it's probably wise to listen.
That's the sad part.
I don't know if it applies here, but sometimes companies with deeper relationships with manufacturers are trusted with documents detailing a deeper level of the architecture. He could very well be all for taking some lessons from Naughty Dog, but maybe they can't tell him anything.
To be fair, he did say he was confident he could fix the issues. So he's talking about development problems, not finished-product performance problems.
LittleBigPlanet, inFamous, Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, Resistance 2, GT5, the Ratchet & Clank games, Demon's Souls, Heavenly Sword, Folklore and so forth and so on, all excellent PS3 games with no performance issues. Someone out there is doing something right, no? Then again, there have been a few canceled PS3 titles or certain high-profile 360 exclusives that stand out as "how the hell isn't this coming to the system?"
The good games programmed for the console (and its quirks) WORK. Most PC and 360 ports to the PS3 seem to have all sorts of development issues noted by other posters here. It seems as if the only real solution is programming two versions of certain games, but this is financially insane, of course.
Granted, a developer like Valve would make a mint if there was a PS3 version of L4D, but given the time (lots more than they want to take away from other projects) and money (a mint, mind you) they'd spend trying to do what they want with the hardware... well, you know the rest.
(although I'm sure EA wouldn't mind some extra pocket change from a PS3 version...)
Anyway, let's see what RAGE plays like when it ships on all formats, then go nuts comparing and/or complaining.
Thanks to the PS3 version of The Orange Box I think EA knows no one would buy an in-house port of any Valve games anyway.
I think some of you are missing the point some of us were trying to make. We're well aware the PS3 has produced some sick visuals, but some developers are just having to work harder to get there than they do with the same game on the 360.
Uncharted 2...
You're thinking of Naughty Dog, ID's making a game called rage.
No what i wanted to say if UNCHARTED 2 looks way better than this... Then i think CARMACK can at least admit that his team is proficient in the X360 development and are noobs with PS3. At least the truth...
As I noted above your Uncharted argument is null and void because it is a platform exclusive developed from the ground up make the PS3 shine. Carmack is developing a cross platform title and is one of, if not the foremost engine developer in the industry, to claim his words are due to a lack of competence with the PS3 hardware is clutching at straws.
All this and yet almost all PS3 exclusives have put the 360 exclusives to shame technically, It sounds like developers just need to utilize the system better. It really should put some of these devs in there place when games like Gran Turismo and Uncharted look and run so smoothly compared to any other games out there.
Well of course Gran Turismo looks great. It's first party. They knew the details of the RSX from the moment they typed "Hello World" on the PS3.
Carmack's one of the last "taught myself to code on my Dad's Aerospace workstation" nerds, with no PR training or need of it. He sees every device in relation to how each component reacts to his code. Most developers explain their platform experience based on corporate relationships. If he says the RSX is slower, I'll bet it is slower.
There are "workarounds". Take Metal Gear, for example. Kojima found that if you use uncompressed texture data, you save the GPU the time it takes to decompress them. Which lead to faster framerates, and a 50GB game pressed on a Dual-Layer BD that Konami had help develop because the process hadn't been figured out then. So even exclusives have had their development slowed by the RSX.
But the textures in MGS4 were pretty bad, other than those on character models.
I don't know if it's safe to comment on the quality of MGS4 on this forum :)
However, I don't actually know what compromises had to be made to the textures themselves to get the game to run smoothly; just that they were uncompressed.
I'm also sure textures weren't the only space-hogging resource, but my knowledge of it slides after the textures - I do 3D art as a hobbyist, & 3D forums are always abuzz with boring industry texture & model techniques.
You said the textures, "were uncompressed" isn't that (and FMV that used in-game assets) the reason why the game took up so much memory? I'm no expert, but don't textures take up an ass-load of memory?
That's exactly why.
God, just switching a .bmp file to a 32-bit .png file cuts your file's "footprint" to a tenth of it's normal size.
Most game developers use even higher, and better, compression algorithms, but they also depend on the graphics card to be able to unfold these with some semblance of speed.
That's because .bmp is a bitmap, the raw data (No compression applied).
Hmm, interesting.
Ouch, that stings a little bit. If they get it right in the end that's all that matters, but the extra development time could have been put to better use than struggling with the PS3's eccentric (I'm trying to be nice) design.
Lets just hope it doesn't go the way of the Ghostbusters game. As long as both versions turn out fine we should all be happy.
Carmack was just surprised. Who wouldn't be? The rasteriser ,for the uninitiated, is the ability of GPU to turn polygons into the 2D objects you see on a 2D television.
It's a well-defined technology in the GPU space, & the last place you'd intend to run into a hurdle. It would really slow down development. You'd have to define many of the 2D parameters yourself. If you didn't know that going in, you'd have to rewrite a lot of code. Sony's notorious for not using patented graphics tech - that's why their anti-aliasing still sucks.
I'm sure they'll fix it too, but it would really tick me off to know I just doubled my "crunch-time".
I used to love NEXT gen. This is crap.
I try to look at Edge as unbiased but I simply can't. I noticed that the 20/30 fps isn't quoted wihch makes me think that you GUESSED the frame rate. Carmak says, and I'm quoting, "The PS3 does lag a LITTLE BIT BEHIND". A 35 fps diference is not "a little bit".
The purpose of this article is just one: to draw clicks on Edge and to start fanboys wars.
It's funny how Edge ommited the part where Carmak mentions that textures on the XBox needs work and has a lot of popping.
By the time this game releases, the game will look identical on all platforms. It's not like the game is coming out tomorrow.
This is just like taking a look at a building that isn't finished and say : "This building is a failure, it has no walls". It's just ridiculous.
"This is just like taking a look at a building that isn't finished and say : "This building is a failure, it has no walls". It's just ridiculous."
Unless work started on another building with identical blueprints at the same time and that building had walls and paint already at the same point in it's development.
You obviously didn't get my point, but I will explain:
You cannot judge something if it isn't finished. So, making news out of a work in progress game is just wrong.
Why didn't Edge posted an article about the game itself? No, Edge had to post something about XBox vs PS3. I have no doubt that this has only the objective 1) getting clicks, 2) start fanboy wars.
In every forum I go about video games there's a thread about this "news" and a big fanboy war inside.
The posts in the ast few days have been pretty technical, sales and whatnot, a making of and this. Boring, gimme some info on Rage, not framerates.
Buy your copy of the magazine on Monday at our online shop (UK and Europe only).
As the man said, if you wanna read about the game go buy the magazine & like me you too can enjoy the 9 page feature inside :D
Haha fair enough, yup I forget they're primarily trying to sell a magazine sometimes :-) I'm far too cheap to buy the mag, it costs $35 here because they Airfreight it in :-( Used to get it all the time though when I worked in a mag store.
No I get your point but they weren't juding the PS3 version on its own merits, there were judging it relative to its competitor's version which apparently is handling the game code much easier making less work for the developers. Sure the building will look the same when it's done, but it'll talk a lot more work to get the same results and that seems to be the point.
And when the game is done if the PS3 version performs better we can have another useless article like this.
They did say the games will look identical in the end so whats with the conspiracy theory? I mean just by the recently released Ghostbuster's game you can see why this article is worth mention, that game looks better on the 360, not by much but it was worth mention it, is there a conspiracy there too?
As for your theory of drawing clicks to EDGE, you need to already be on the site to see the article so the click is already counted, unless you imply that people that get upset with the article will text their friends so they get to EDGE and see the outrage for themselves then I guess it does draw traffic to the site but honestly, you got upset about the article but didn't told your friends to check EDGE's site right? right?
It sure increases the ammout of comments doesn't it? Even I have increased the click count because i've came here at least twice. And if you read and reply to my post, there will be one more click at least.
Do you see now how Edge can increase the ammount of clicks on their site? See the banner up in the page? It's called an Ad. The site needs trafic to get Ads.
If you put the words "The PS3 version of Rage runs at 20/30fps and the XBox runs at 60fps" on the mouth of a video game God like Carmack then you will for sure get a lot of trafic on your site.
Ummm did you know that the traffic of a website is measured by the number of unique visitors a site gets? Your IP address is already registered and it doesn't count more than once, just saying as it seems you didn't know how traffic is measured.
You're about 50% correct there.
Really? Can you get into more details? Seriously, I want to learn the whole thing if I'm wrong.
Unique visitors is just one metric, lots of sites will use pageviews just as much. It's also possible to have a dynamic IP address. In terms of the adverts, pageviews are the metric that would matter more as it gives a better indicator of ad exposure than UV.
But isn't that the whole point of Edge Online; to make money and generate more sales for their magazine?
Honestly, I agree. Let's just wait and see what the heck happens when the games are *actually* released. I have faith in Engine John, regardless of the platform. Let's just rejoice that we're getting another potentially kick-ass id game.